Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4183. When we talk about the Spirit in suffering, we are touching one of the most tender places in the Christian life, because suffering is where our theology either becomes real or falls apart. It is one thing to confess that the Holy Spirit indwells the believer when life is calm. It is another…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4182. Almost every Christian I have ever pastored has had at least one sin that seems to cling closer than the rest, and the longing to overcome a besetting sin is one of the most painful and persistent struggles of the believing life. It may be a temper that flares before you can stop…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4181. The difference between being Spirit-led and impulse-led is one of the most practical things a Christian can learn, and one of the most commonly muddled. A sudden strong feeling rises up, an urge to speak, to give, to act, to walk away, and we baptise it with the language of guidance. We say…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4180. When people ask me how the Spirit and marriage decisions relate, they usually want one of two things. Either they are single and longing to know whether a particular person is the one God has for them, or they are already courting and want assurance that they are not making a terrible mistake….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4179. Few questions touch daily Christian living as closely as the relationship between the Spirit and the conscience, because both of them speak to us from within and we do not always find it easy to tell their voices apart. You feel a check before you say something unkind. You feel a weight after…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4197. We usually think it is possible to grieve the Spirit only as individuals, in the privacy of our own hearts, but Paul’s warning was written to a whole church and aimed at the way its members treated one another. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4196. The love among believers that Jesus made the badge of His disciples is not something we work up by trying harder to be nice; it is fruit the Holy Spirit grows. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, He said, if you have love for one another (John 13:35)….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4195. When Paul calls the Philippians to be of one mind, he is not asking a roomful of different people to think identical thoughts, and a great deal of needless guilt has been laid on believers who assumed he was. The language appears across Paul’s letter to Philippi, in his plea that they stand…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4194. When Paul tells the Ephesians to be eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (Ephesians 4:3), he hands the church one of its most precious and most misunderstood phrases. People reach for it whenever they want to paper over a disagreement, as though the unity of the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4193. Nothing wounds a congregation quite like church division, and nothing exposes how badly we need the Holy Spirit more clearly than the way a fellowship can tear itself apart over things that will not matter in a hundred years. A fallout over the colour of the carpet, a faction gathering round a charismatic…